How to measure social media click activity

Why do we measure click activity?

If you want to track clicks on any links you provide to the influencers, or track e-commerce and downloads on your website through Google Analytics (you definitely do want to do this), you will need to do some initial groundwork.

Providing tracking links to influencers

Providing tracking links to influencers, instead of ‘naked’ untagged links, will allow you to track and categorise clicks from your influencer campaign in Google Analytics – this can easily be adapted for other website analytics tools as well.

This allows you to measure traffic in the following dimensions:

• Source – which platform and influencer the traffic came from
• Medium – broadly, which medium e.g. social, search, email, etc.
• Content – which individual content piece or post drove traffic
• Campaign – the overall campaign traffic

Once you’ve entered these variables along with your destination URL into the spreadsheet, your complete URL will be automatically generated in column ‘F’ for you to share with your influencer.

Shorten the URL

As these URLs can be long, you may want to shorten them using a service such as Bitly or Firebase (for app traffic). Add your shortened link to the final column, so you have a record of which content and influencer they belong to.

Audience click data

Audience ‘click’ data can be brought back onto your CRM system to help understand their individual behaviours and preferences. You can use this in future to do deeper research into what works for your different audience groups.

Campaign targeting lists

The business and other channels can use it to inform segments and campaign targeting lists. It is often called behavioural data as it records the way individuals behave. Before doing this, check that it is in line with your privacy statements and that you are GDPR compliant.